Last week, the US Department of the Interior announced that it would speed up the approval process for certain fossil fuel projects, proclaiming that environmental analyses that previously would have taken years must now be taken down to, at maximum, a month. While the new procedures are seemingly a gift to the industry, this may actually be terrible news for pipeline developers, drillers, and miners.
“If I were a developer of any of these projects, I would look at this order and smack my forehead,” says Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, the United States’ biggest environmental nonprofit law organization. “I don’t